Pandeism
Pandeism According to Chuck Clendenen, Founder of Unified Deism: "Pandeists, like Pantheists, believe that God and nature are the same thing. Panendeists believe that God both encompasses all of nature and transcends nature. The Panendeist community is small but quite active, and many of its members post a great deal of philosophical and scientific material on the Internet. Some have integrated Deism with the work of philosopher Ken Wilbur. The most active Panendeist site, Panendeism.org, is a member of the Deist Alliance." -http://www.sbnr.org/varieties-and-categories-of-deism.html Pandeism on Wikipedia: Pandeism (or pan-deism) is a theological doctrine which combines aspects of pantheisminto deism.1 It holds that the creator deity became the universe and ceased to exist as aseparate and conscious entity.2345 Pandeism is proposed to explain, as it relates to deism, why God would create a universe and then abandon it,6 and as to pantheism, the origin and purpose of the universe.67 The word pandeism is a hybrid blend of the root words pantheism and deism, combiningAncient Greek: πᾶν pan "all" with Latin: deus which means "god". It was perhaps first coined in the present meaning in 1859 by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal.8 Contents hide * 1 A pantheistic form of deism * 2 Progression ** 2.1 The ancient world ** 2.2 From medieval times to the Enlightenment ** 2.3 Post-Enlightenment philosophy *** 2.3.1 In Asian philosophy *** 2.3.2 In Western philosophy ** 2.4 Twenty-first century developments * 3 See also * 4 Notes * 5 External links A pantheistic form of deismedit Pandeism falls within the traditional hierarchy of monistic9 and nontheistic philosophies addressing the nature of God.10 For the history of the root words, pantheism and deism, see the overview of deism section, and history of pantheism section. The earliest use of the actual term, pandeism, appears to have come as early as 1787,11 with another use related in 1838,12 a first appearance in a dictionaryin 1849 (in German, as 'Pandeismus' and 'Pandeistisch'),13 and an 1859 usage of "pandeism" possibly in contrast to both pantheism and deism by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal.8 Physicist and philosopher Max Bernhard Weinstein in his 1910 work Welt- und Lebensanschauungen, Hervorgegangen aus Religion, Philosophie und Naturerkenntnis ("World and Life Views, Emerging From Religion, Philosophy and Nature"), presented the broadest and most far-reaching examination of pandeism written up to that point. Weinstein noted the distinction between pantheism and pandeism, stating "even if only by a letter (d'' in place of ''th), we fundamentally differ Pandeism from Pantheism."14 But it has been noted that some pantheists have identified themselves as pandeists as well, to underscore that "they share with the deists the idea that God is not a personal God who desires to be worshipped".15 Noting that Victorian scholar George Levine has suggested that secularism can bring the "fullness" which "religion has always promised," other authors have since observed:16 This is classed within a general tendency of postmodernity to be "a stunning amalgamation" of the views of William James and Max Weber, representing "the movement away from self-denial toward a denial of the supernatural", which "promises to fundamentally alter future geographies of mind and being by shifting the locus of causality from an exalted Godhead to the domain of Nature".16 Progressionedit The ancient worldedit Physicist and philosopher Max Bernhard Weinstein wrote that 6th century BC philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon spoke as a pandeist in stating that there was one god which "abideth ever in the selfsame place, moving not at all" and yet "sees all over, thinks all over, and hears all over." The earliest seeds of pandeism coincide with notions of monotheism, which generally can be traced back to the Atenism of Akhenaten, and the Babylonian-era Marduk. Weinstein in particular identified the idea of primary matter derived from an original spirit as found by the ancient Egyptians to be a form of pandeism.17 Weinstein similarly found varieties of pandeism in the religious views held in China18 (especially with respect to Taoism as expressed by Lao-Tze),19India, especially in the Hindu Bhagavad Gita,20 and among various Greek and Romanphilosophers. Specifically, Weinstein wrote that 6th century BC philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon spoke as a pandeist in stating that there was one god which "abideth ever in the selfsame place, moving not at all" and yet "sees all over, thinks all over, and hears all over."21 He similarly found that ideas of pandeism were reflected in the ideas of Heraclitus, and of the Stoics.22 Weinstein also wrote that pandeism was especially expressed by the later students of the 'PlatonicPythagoreans' and the 'Pythagorean Platonists.'23 and among them specifically identified 3rd century BC philosopher Chrysippus, who affirmed that "the universe itself is God and the universal outpouring of its soul,"24 as a pandeist as well.22 Religious studies professor, F. E. Peters, however, found with respect to the Milesians that "what appeared... at the center of thePythagorean tradition in philosophy, is another view of psyche that seems to owe little or nothing to the pan-vitalism or pan-deism that is the legacy of the Milesians.25 Gottfried Große in his 1787 interpretation of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, describes Pliny, a first-century figure, as "if not aSpinozist, then perhaps a Pandeist."11 From medieval times to the Enlightenmentedit Weinstein examines the philosophy of 9th century theologian Johannes Scotus Eriugena, who proposed that "God has created the world out of his own being," and identifies this as a form of pandeism, noting in particular that Eriugena's vision of God was one which does not know what it is, and learns this through the process of existing as its creation.26 In his great work, De divisione naturae (also called''Periphyseon'', probably completed around 867 AD), Eriugena proposed that the nature of the universe is divisible into four distinct classes: : 1 – that which creates and is not created; : 2 – that which is created and creates; : 3 – that which is created and does not create; : 4 – that which neither is created nor creates. The first stage is God as the ground or origin of all things; the second is the world of Platonic ideals or forms; the third is the wholly physical manifestation of our Universe, which "does not create"; the last is God as the final end or goal of all things, that into which the world of created things ultimately returns to completeness with the additional knowledge of having experienced this world. A contemporary statement of this idea is that: "Since God is not a being, he is therefore not intelligible... This means not only that we cannot understand him, but also that he cannot understand himself. Creation is a kind of divine effort by God to understand himself, to see himself in a mirror."27 Weinstein also found that thirteenth century Catholic thinker Bonaventure—who championed the Platonic doctrine that ideas do not exist in rerum natura, but as ideals exemplified by the Divine Being, according to which actual things were formed—showed strong pandeistic inclinations.28 Of Nicholas of Cusa, who wrote of the enfolding of creation in God and the unfolding of the divine human mind in creation, Weinstein wrote that he was, to a certain extent, a pandeist.29 And, as to Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont, who had written A Cabbalistical Dialogue (Latin version first, 1677, in English 1682) placing matter and spirit on a continuum, and describing matter as a "coalition" of monads, Weinstein also found this to be a kind of pandeism.30 Weinstein found that pandeism was strongly expressed in the teachings of Giordano Bruno, who envisioned a deity which had no particular relation to one part of the infinite universe more than any other, and was immanent, as present on Earth as in the Heavens, subsuming in itself the multiplicity of existence.31 This was reiterated by others including Discover editor Corey S. Powell, who wrote that Bruno's cosmology was "a tool for advancing an animist or Pandeist theology."3233 Italian theologian Giordano Brunowas charged with heresy and burned at the stake for propounding what has been deemed by some commentators to be a pandeistic ideology. Literary critic, Hayden Carruth, said of 18th century figure Alexander Pope that it was "Pope's rationalism and pandeism with which he wrote the greatest mock-epic in English literature"34 In 1834, publisher Giovanni Silvestri published a volume of sermons of Italian padre Filippo Nani of Lojano, who criticized Pandeism, declaring, "To you, fatal Pandeist! the laws that create nature are contingent and mutable, not another being in substance with forces driven by motions and developments."35 And in 1838, another Italian, phrenologist Luigi Ferrarese in Memorie Riguardanti la Dottrina Frenologica ("Thoughts Regarding the Doctrine of Phrenology") critically described Victor Cousin's philosophy as a doctrine which "locates reason outside the human person, declaring man a fragment of God, introducing a sort of spiritual pandeism, absurd for us, and injurious to the Supreme Being."12 The 1859 German work, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft by philosophers and frequent collaborators Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal, stated, "Man stelle es also den Denkern frei, ob sie Theisten, Pan-theisten,Atheisten, Deisten (und warum nicht auch Pandeisten?)...8 ("Man leaves it to the philosophers, whether they are Theists, Pan-theists, Atheists, Deists (and why not also Pandeists?)..." According to American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia, "later Unitarian Christians (such as William Ellery Channing), transcendentalists (such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau), writers (such as Walt Whitman) and some pragmatists (such as William James) took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world".36 TheBelgian poet Robert Vivier wrote of the pandeism to be found in the works of Nineteenth Century novelist and poet Victor Hugo.37 Similarly in the Nineteenth Century, poet Alfred Tennysonrevealed that his "religious beliefs also defied convention, leaning towards agnosticism and pandeism".3839 Friedrich Engels has also been described by at least one historian as having pandeistic views.40 Post-Enlightenment philosophyedit In Asian philosophyedit Main article: Pandeism in Asia Weinstein asserted the presence of pandeism in China,18 including in Lao-Tze's Taoism,19 and in India, especially in the HinduBhagavad Gita.20 Other philosophers have also pointed to pandeism as having a presence in the cultures of Asia. In 1833, religionistGodfrey Higgins theorized in his Anacalypsis that "Pandeism was a doctrine, which had been received both by Buddhists andBrahmins."41 In 1896, historian Gustavo Uzielli described the world's population as influenced "by a superhuman idealism in Christianity, by an anti-human nihilism in Buddhism, and by an incipient but growing pandeism in Indian Brahmanism."42 But the following year, the Reverend Henry Grattan Guinness wrote critically that in India, "God is everything, and everything is God, and, therefore, everything may be adored. ... Her pan-deism is a pandemonium."43 Likewise, twenty years earlier, in 1877, Peruvian scholar and historian Carlos Wiesse Portocarrero had written in an essay titled Philosophical Systems of India that in that country, "Metaphysics is pandeistic and degenerates into idealism."44 German political philosopher Jürgen Hartmann observes that Hindu pandeism has contributed to friction with monotheistic Islam.45 Pandeism (in Chinese, 泛自然神论)46 was described by Wen Chi, in a Peking University lecture, as embodying "a major feature of Chinese philosophical thought," in that "there is a harmony between man and the divine, and they are equal."47 Zhang Dao Kui (张道葵) of the China Three Gorges University proposed that the art of China's Three Gorges area is influenced by "a representation of the romantic essence that is created when integrating rugged simplicity with the natural beauty spoken about by pandeism."48 Literary critic Wang Junkang (王俊康) has written that, in Chinese folk religion as conveyed in the early novels of noted folk writer Ye Mei (叶梅),49 "the romantic spirit of Pandeism can be seen everywhere."50 Wang Junkang additionally writes of Ye Mei's descriptions of "the worship of reproduction under Pandeism, as demonstrated in romantic songs sung by village people to show the strong impulse of vitality and humanity and the beauty of wildness."51 It has been noted that author Shen Congwen has attributed a kind of hysteria that "afflicts those young girls who commit suicide by jumping into caves-"luodong" 落洞" to "the repressive local military culture that imposes strict sexual codes on women and to the influence of pan-deism among Miao people," since "for a nymphomaniac, jumping into a cave leads to the ultimate union with the god of the cave".52 Weinstein similarly found the views of 17th century Japanese Neo-Confucian philosopherYamazaki Ansai, who espoused a cosmology of universal mutual interconnectedness, to be especially consonant with pandeism.53 In Western philosophyedit Pandeism has been proposed to be a traditional religious view that accords with modern science. In The Pilgrimage from Deism to Agnosticism, Moncure Daniel Conway stated that the term, "Pandeism" is "an unscholarly combination".54 A similar critique of Pandeism as an 'unsightly' combination of Greek and Latin was made in a review of Weinstein's discussion of Pandeism.55The reviewer further criticises Weinstein's broad assertions that Scotus Eriugena, Anselm of Canterbury, Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Mendelssohn, and Lessing all were Pandeists or leaned towards Pandeism.55 Towards the beginning of World War I, an article in the Yale Sheffield Monthly published by the Yale University Sheffield Scientific School commented on speculation that the war "means the death of Christianity and an era of Pandeism or perhaps even the destruction of all which we call modern civilization and culture."56 The following year, early 19th-century German philosopher Paul Friedrich Köhler wrote that Pantheism, Pandeism,Monism and Dualism all refer to the same God illuminated in different ways, and that whatever the label, the human soul emanates from this God. 57 Pandeism was noted by literary critic Martin Lüdke as a philosophy expressed by early Twentieth-Century Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, especially as to those writings made under the pseudonym of Alberto Caeiro.58 Pandeism was likewise noted by authors like Brazilian journalist and writer Otávio de Faria, and British scholar and translator of Portuguese fiction Giovanni Pontiero, among others, to be an influence on the writings of noted mid-Twentieth-Century Brazilian poet Carlos Nejar,5960 of whom de Faria wrote that "the pandeism of Nejar is one of the strongest poetic ideas that we have reached in the world of poetry."60 Pandeism was also examined by theologian Charles Hartshorne, one of the chief disciples of process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. In his process theology, an extension of Whitehead's work, Hartshorne preferred pandeism to pantheism, explaining that "it is not really the theos that is described".61:347 However, he specifically rejected pandeism early on, finding that a God who had "absolute perfection in some respects, relative perfection in all others" was "able consistently to embrace all that is positive in either deism or pandeism."61:348 Hartshorne accepted the label of panentheism for his beliefs, declaring that "panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations".61:34862 Charles Anselm Bolton states in a 1963 article, Beyond the Ecumenical: Pan-deism?63 that he "first came upon this extension ofecumenism into pan-deism among some Roman Catholic scholars interested primarily in the 'reunion of the churches,' Roman, Orthodox,Anglican," and wondered, "what is the ultimate aim of the Curia in promoting the pan-deist movement."63 Robert A. Heinlein especially enjoyed this idea, and raised it in several of his works. Literary critic Dan Schneider wrote of Heinlein's''Stranger In A Strange Land'' that Jubal Harshaw's belief in his own free will, was one "which Mike, Jill, and the Fosterites misinterpret as a pandeistic urge, 'Thou art God!'"64 Heinlein himself, in his "Aphorisms of Lazarus Long", in his 1973 book Time Enough for Love wrote, "God split himself into a myriad parts that he might have friends. This may not be true, but it sounds good—and is no sillier than any other theology."65 A 1995 news article quoted this use of the term by Jim Garvin, a Vietnam veteran who became a Trappist monk in the Holy Cross Abbeyof Berryville, Virginia. Garvin described his spiritual position as "'pandeism' or 'pan-en-deism,' something very close to the Native American concept of the all- pervading Great Spirit..."66 The following year, Pastor Bob Burridge of the Geneven Institute for Reformed Studies wrote that: "If God was the proximate cause of every act it would make all events to be "God in motion". That is nothing less than pantheism, or more exactly, pandeism."67 Burridge rejects this model, observing that in Christianity, "The Creator is distinct from his creation. The reality of secondary causes is what separates Christian theism from pandeism."67 Burridge concludes by challenging that "calling God the author of sin demands a pandeistic understanding of the universe effectively removing the reality of sin and moral law."67 Twenty-first century developmentsedit More recently, pandeism has been classed as a logical derivation of German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's proposition that ours was the best of all possible worlds.68 In 2010, author William C. Lane contended that: Acknowledging that American religious philosopher William Rowe has raised "a powerful, evidential argument against ethical theism," Lane further contended that pandeism offers an escape from the evidential argument from evil: In 2010 German astrophysicist and popular scientist Harald Lesch observed in a debate on the role of faith in science: In 2011, social scientist Niall Douglas wrote that in pandeism, "God is growth, God is structure/knowledge, God is everything and nothing simultaneously. And, rather heretically for the Abrahamic religions, to perceive i.e. to cognate i.e. to be of matter i.e. to be structured energy generating a gravimetric field is an aspect of God relating to another aspect of God through light, which is of course God. In this, the underlying metaphysics are most definitely Pandeist."71 Alan Dawe's 2011 book The God Franchise, though mentioning pandeism in passing as one of numerous extant theological theories,4 declines to adopt any "-ism" as encompassing his view, though Dawe's theory includes the human experience as being a temporarily segregated sliver of the experience of God. This aspect of the theology of pandeism (along with pantheism and panentheism) has been compared to the Biblical exhortation in Acts 17:28 that "In him we live and move and have our being,"72 while the Wycliffe Bible Encyclopedia had in 1975 described the religion of Babylon as "clearly a type of pan-deism formed from a synthesis of Christianity and paganism".73 Also in 2011, in a study of Germany's Hesse region, German sociologist of religion and theologian Michael N. Ebertz and German television presenter and author Meinhard Schmidt-Degenhardconcluded that "Six religious orientation types can be distinguished: "Christians" - "non-Christian theists" - "Cosmotheists" - "Deists, Pandeists and Polytheists" - "Atheists" - "Others"."74 Pandeism has also been described as one of the "older spiritual and religious traditions" whose elements are incorporated into the New Age movement,7576 but also as among the handful of spiritual beliefs which "are compatible with modern science."77 In 2013, Australian religious studies scholar Raphael Lataster proposed that "Pandeism could be the most likely God-concept of all."1